Supernova
by Bryon Nightshade
Summary: Rock is dead. Thomas Light is dying. But there's a little time left- time enough for one last incandescent burst of genius. Time enough to right one last wrong. Complete.
1. Accepting the Burden

_Disclaimer: Mega Man and associated characters and situations are copyright Capcom._

* * *

Thomas Light-PhD in robotics, PhD in cybernetics, repeat Nobel laureate, acclaimed inventor, titan of industry, technology pioneer, warrior for peace—was weary.

He had every right to be. There was, of course, that exhaustive/exhausting list of accomplishments. There was also age. He'd lived a full life, and was quickly approaching what most people would call "elderly". And he'd suffered more than any two normal people: suffered betrayal and fear, pain and loss.

Yet he felt another layer of tiredness there beyond any of it.

His body ached. He was tired all the time these days. He couldn't be bothered to eat. His famously portly belly was shrinking day by day. Even the simplest tasks left him winded. There wasn't pain, which bothered him more than if there was. And he couldn't seem to kick this cough.

Maybe, he thought idly to himself, if the doctor would prescribe him something for the cough, he'd feel more like himself.

He knew better. The real reason he felt so weary wasn't the presence of any physical sensation. Quite the opposite. Part of him was missing, and no doctor could restore it.

His heart still beat a little faster when the doctor entered the room. His face was set in the not-grim-but-terribly-professional expression common to members of his calling. "Dr. Light?" he said.

"Yes," Thomas confirmed.

"We'd like to get some chest X-rays done now."

Dr. Light frowned. "Chest x-rays? For a cough?"

The doctor's expression was fixed as if in stone. "We think it's not just a cough."

* * *

It was a chill November day, the sort people associate with the misery of winter, but which doesn't have the good sense to wait until winter to happen. The wind was biting, the sky gloomy and overcast. Combined with the natural shade from the carefully manicured trees, the weather made visiting the cemetery a more unpleasant experience than usual.

That counted double for old men with ailments of the lungs. Yet nothing would have kept Thomas away.

In the car behind Thomas was a folder the doctor had given him. Inside were copies of the chest x-rays with the insidious white splotches in both lungs. Inside was a prognosis written in unerringly formal language. Inside was the symptoms list. It had taken Thomas little effort to memorize the contents of that last; it was only with hindsight that he realized how long he'd lived with the condition.

_Shortness of breath, with or without exertion. Persistent coughing, eventually including sputum and blood. Fatigue. Night sweats. Chills. Loss of appetite. Weight loss._ (Thomas grinned grimly; that last one was taking its time to fully affect him.) _End state: pulmonary collapse, leading to death. Best case scenario: 12-18 months. Worst case scenario: 6 months._

He'd been to the cemetery before, and at times, he'd contemplated his own mortality. He was an intellectual, so he'd wrestled with the concept of death in intellectual terms. By his standards he was a winner. He may have been a biological dead end, but he'd still contributed greatly to humanity. His inventions had improved mankind's lot immensely. His influence would be carried on long after his passing, both directly through his successors at Light Labs, and indirectly through the changes his technologies had wrought to society. His legacy was secure.

Perhaps too secure, he thought with a frown. The new generation of roboticists seemed content to duplicate or tweak things Thomas had already invented rather than innovating. Even his subordinates at Light Labs seemed only too happy to mark time while they waited for the master's next breakthrough. Regardless, he'd achieved as much as any man could hope to achieve.

And all of that seemed insignificant next to the yawning void that pulled in every happy thought and achievement and good memory.

The marker was small. Thomas had wanted an actual grave, but that had been asking too much. The custodian of the cemetery had been remarkably close-minded on the subject. Thomas had insisted, but in the end the custodian had called in a lawyer, and the lawyer had asked some uncomfortable questions about heavy metals leeching and groundwater deposits and toxin leaks. It had been too hard to fight, so Thomas had settled for the marker.

He'd buried Rock on his own land, on his own terms, and anyone who objected to _that_ could go to Hell.

The marker wasn't really for Rock, anyway. An old speaker had once said that the true purpose of cemeteries was for the living. It was a place where the living went to dedicate themselves to the missions the dead had left behind. Thomas remembered the words well. He'd memorized them in school as a child. They rang false to him now.

Sons were supposed to outlive their fathers.

What burden of Rock's could Thomas pick up now, so late in his own life?

Finish off Dr. Wily, maybe, assuming he hadn't bought a farm of his own in that last stupendous explosion? No. After so many wars Thomas had actually lost count of them, he wanted nothing more than to be done with his longtime rival. Others could take up that fight, if Wily was still alive at all. Thomas couldn't stand the notion, illogical though it might have been, that it was his feud with Wily that had ultimately killed his son.

He remembered Rock's sincerity, his need to do something about Wily's crimes. He would have gone anyway, Thomas knew. He was compelled.

Thomas' thoughts coalesced around the notion. Compelled… that was the word, wasn't it? Thomas looked on the grave as if for the first time. He remembered Rock's enthusiasm, his unfailing exuberance, his unabashed love for Thomas and Roll alike. He truly was everything a father could have asked out of a son. And why shouldn't he be? Thomas had built him to be just that.

Thomas sucked in a breath of the cold fall air. Rock had been so perfect because anything less would have been a failure on Thomas' part. Even Rock's sacrifice was cheapened by its predetermination. Fuses burned out to protect circuits, but there was nothing heroic about it. They were merely doing what they were designed to do. All those qualities that made Rock so endearing were nothing more than a projection of Thomas' will. They weren't Rock's own.

Thomas sank to his knees before the marker. He felt that endless showers couldn't remove this feeling of intense uncleanness. "I cheated you," he said to the stone. "Even the best of you was never really yours. Please forgive me."

A cold wind swept across the grounds. It cut right through Thomas' jacket; he shivered, which shook his lungs, which induced a spasm of coughing. It was several seconds before Thomas was able to collect himself and stand. It was hard work, harder than it should have been. For a moment the exertion demanded his attention. When he was standing again, he felt the emptiness return.

All of a sudden he felt unworthy of his own son. Rock and Roll had been his family. They'd cared for him, surprised him, chastised him on occasion when he deserved it, maybe even loved him—but never in any unsafe way, never outside their original parameters. The strings were light and almost invisible, but they were strings all the same.

That was one of the first critiques of his work, now that he stopped to think about it. He was a man playing with dolls—albeit extremely sophisticated dolls. Funny how long it had taken that criticism to reach him, and how only now could he admit that there may have been a point there.

Would he have noticed if Rock were still alive? If Rock were there to distract him from the point, whose growth seemed to belie the predetermination of his fate? Was it only because Thomas had been forced into self-reflection by Rock's demise to truly understand how he'd shackled his son so? His blindness scared him almost as much as the casual way in which he'd forced his will upon his children.

And in the end, it _was_ his will that had led to his son's death. The basic goodness he'd programmed into Rock—clumsily, unwittingly, without full knowledge of the consequences—had pushed Rock to defeat Wily whatever the cost to himself. It would be callous to suggest the world could burn if it meant keeping Rock alive… but if Rock had no choice in the matter, if, as Thomas was beginning to believe, he'd acted out of Thomas' commands, then Thomas had killed his son as assuredly as if he'd pulled the trigger himself.

He understood, then, what he had to do. That was the burden he would have to take up when he left. He had to do right by his son. He had to cut the strings.

Thomas had received copious love from his robot children. He was unworthy of it because he'd left them no alternative; it was stolen love, undeserved. He would repay that debt. He would pass on to others the love he'd taken.

There wasn't much time left for him in this world, but if he could, he would summon up one final act of genius—and create a robot who could love because it chose to do so.

With his dying breath, he would make robots human.

* * *

"Oh, Dr. Light!"

Roll bit her bottom lip. Thomas was sure it would have quivered if she hadn't. "I was starting to worry about you," she continued. "You took much longer than I expected."

"Being on time's never been my strength, daughter, you know that."

Roll flinched at the word. "I know, but this was still unusual. Did the appointment really take that long?"

"No, I dilly-dallied on the way home."

She took his coat from him, as always, and hung it up in the hall closet. She lingered there, turned away from him, while he doffed his shoes and started into the house. He felt her absence after only a few steps. Usually she was right on his heels. "Roll?"

"Sorry," she said tremulously. "I… well, what did the doctor say?"

He couldn't face her. He'd spent the trip home from the cemetery thinking about how to tell her and hadn't come up with anything. He took a breath—and immediately began coughing. She rushed to his side to support him with her deceptively strong frame. "Sorry to trouble you," he said.

Her face contorted with emotion as she fought her tears. "You're dying, aren't you?" She looked at his face. Even though he said nothing, she saw something that confirmed her fears for her. "You are! You're dying! You were always too busy to go to the doctor's, too wrapped up in some project, and now… and now…"

"I wasn't thinking about how it would affect you," he said with a sigh. "I didn't think it mattered, not when I was so old already."

She pushed away from him. "Didn't think it—of course it mattered! You're everything to me and R… and now you're going to die!" She took a sharp, nasal breath—purely for effect, an exquisitely programmed display of emotion for a robot that didn't need to breathe. "I've already lost Rock, and now you're leaving me. I'll be all alone… all alone…"

Thomas saw the strings again. The way he'd programmed poor Roll had defined her identity entirely in terms of family. If family went away, she simply couldn't function—it was like trying to climb air.

As Thomas looked into her eyes, he knew that she understood that fact, and it terrified her. He sighed again. "No, Roll. You won't."

She looked up at him in surprise and hope. Her impossibly cute face beamed at him. He felt his heartstrings go twang. "Come here," he said, opening his arms for her. She ran into his embrace. When she leaned her head into his chest, his still-agile fingers found a small panel where neck met skull—a panel she was programmed not to know was there.

She frowned. "What's tha—"

He patted her unmoving form and closed his eyes. "Good night, Roll. I didn't deserve you. I'll try to make it up to you. I certainly won't torture you by making you watch me die."

Disentangling himself from the inert robot, he headed for his office. Roll wasn't the only thing he'd need to shut down. He needed to turn over control of Light Labs… order supplies to ensure his private lab was fully stocked… update his will…

It was time to withdraw from worldly affairs. He no longer had time to waste with anyone else. There was no telling how long this project might end up taking. He could afford no distractions.

Dr. Wily had shown Thomas the virtues of reclusion, and Thomas was never too proud to imitate others.

* * *

Outside the lab, the chill mountain air was getting colder by the day. Animals were gorging themselves to prepare for the harsh months ahead. Only the hardy pines seemed unmoved by the relentless march of seasons.

Inside the lab, none of that existed.

The lab had begun life as a mountain retreat in an age when such things were fashionable. It was well appointed as a luxury spot for that unique class of rich person who thinks nature is best appreciated from a helicopter. Sometime after Light Labs became flush with cash, and after the first few Wily Wars showed that robotics weren't exactly ushering in utopia, Thomas had quietly purchased the place, just in case. He wasn't sure "just in case" what, but he had gone to some lengths to make it suitable for long-term habitation for one of his interests. The wine cellar had been the first to go, converted into combination long-term storage and generator housing, but it wasn't the last.

Thomas' foresight always seemed to alternate between scarily prophetic and utterly blind. Setting up a private lab had to fall into the former category. Now he could turn those resources into this last, desperate project.

Thomas felt the pressure building up on him. He did not relish it. He'd completed tasks under time crunches before, usually in response to Dr. Wily. Those instances had usually been responding to specific challenges, compensating for dangers Rock had encountered as Mega Man. In contrast, Rock, Roll, the Robot Masters—all of his major projects had been far more constrained by budget than time. This project, in contrast, had no budget limits—not with a lifetime of savings and the full power of Light Labs behind him. But time… oh, time…

He was tempted to start with Rock's final Mega Man design and work from there. It was a hazardous proposition, he knew, possibly a trap. It would be too easy to accept Rock's limits, when really he hoped this new creation to be something far more. Leaning on Rock would constrain his thinking.

There wasn't much in the way of avoiding it, though. Starting from absolute zero would take much too long. So, with some hesitance, and more than a small feeling of grave robbery, Thomas lifted a few of Rock's design concepts as starting points.

After an hour or so, he felt he'd made enough progress that he needed to save his work. The file name prompt gave him pause. For all his mechanical aptitude, he had issues with names. That was why his luckless robotic children had been saddled with such a weak pun for names. He'd bowed to Wily's naming conventions for the Robot Masters because he could come up with nothing better.

Wily wasn't here to help him this time. He hadn't really thought about a name to this point; he hadn't needed one. There was nothing in his mind to confuse it with.

He sat back and stared at his keyboard as if waiting for it to tell him something. His eyes wandered. Well… there was that…

He could always use a placeholder and come back to a finished name later, after he'd thought about it. Yes, that made sense.

He typed in the letter 'X' and hit "Save".

* * *

_To be continued..._


	2. Making the Call

Thomas avoided the problem for as long as he could, which was longer than most could have. He focused on the delicate programming issues. He pondered the fine balance his new creation's core would have to operate in to hover between innovative and insane. He designed and redesigned ways to help him express the emotions he was sure to feel. Minutes, hours, days went by where he refused to think about the question. Yet it wasn't something he could put off forever. Before he knew it, the face of the problem was showing itself everywhere—when he was starting to compile X's program requirements, when he considered X's power supply, when he began selecting materials. The mind was where Thomas longed to lavish his attention, but he could not neglect the body, and the body was proving troublesome.

And so as Thomas reached the point where a decision was unavoidable, he had to sit down with his conscience and ask himself: Would X be armed?

He wanted to dismiss the question outright. Of course there was no reason his creation should be armed. He wasn't building a soldier, he was building a human, albeit a robot human. (His mind marveled at the seeming oxymoron, then accepted it and moved on.) If X decided at some point that he wanted to be a soldier, well, Thomas hoped he wouldn't, but that would be X's choice to make, if and when it happened.

No, there was no need to arm X. No plasma busters, no heavy armor, no EMP resistance… none of that was necessary for a being whose primary purpose was simply to exist.

And yet, despite himself, Thomas couldn't embrace that decision. A tiny worm of doubt gnawed away at his idealistic certainty. Years of war and destruction had changed him. His first-hand experience with humanity's flaws forced him to reconsider. Despite his best wishes, war was never more than one crisis away. And if he succeeded, if X gained the ability to choose his own path, then he might choose to intervene in such conflicts, just as Rock had, years ago.

In which case, Thomas wouldn't be there to modify his design, jury-rig discarded systems, and improvise a new arsenal for his titanium son. He'd be on his own.

Thomas' paternal instincts reacted to doubt's whisperings. If X chose to fight, Thomas wanted him to have the absolute best possible chance of survival—which would mean making him the most powerful combat robot ever built.

Thomas pulled up the two designs he'd been tinkering with. The first was very nearly human in appearance, wrapped in layers of emotive like-flesh, tiny bristles to simulate hair, even sweat glands as appropriate. He would have tear ducts, respiration simulators, a functioning tongue to allow him to appreciate the taste of food, and more. The proportions were set for a 20-year-old man and, if Thomas was still the engineer he thought he was, X would be able to pull the illusion off almost seamlessly.

The other design was that of a second-generation Mega Man.

Here Thomas hesitated again. If he put weapons in X's hands, wasn't that making the choice for him? A capability, some would argue, incurred an obligation. Even if Thomas knew war would probably recur at some point, that didn't mean he had to wish that destiny upon his son.

Doubt spoke again, and this time it was in far darker terms. Suppose Thomas did succeed, and X was born with all the abilities Thomas intended. He would have ultimate freedom, wouldn't he? Freedom to partake in any joy, or any pleasure… or any crime, or any depravity. It would be up to him, all up to him, and it would be too late for Thomas to do anything about it, he'd be stone-dead and decomposed in his grave while his son, birthed from the purest intentions, destroyed the society Thomas had spent so long nurturing…

The thought brought such a severe chill that Thomas shivered, which induced yet another coughing fit. When he took his hand away, a hint of red colored his hand, causing him to frown.

Time was short. If he made no decision, soon he'd lose his chance.

But instead he tinkered with X's core. He set up the fabricators that would shape the titanium-x alloy of X's skeleton. He did a dozen little things that needed to be done and yet didn't really advance the project. He couldn't really move forward until he made this decision, and that was turning into an ordeal.

As he battled with sleep and half-heartedly chewed a mouthful of instant noodles, he toyed with the idea of flipping a coin. It was as rational a method of choosing as any he could think of.

In the end, it was something unexpected that settled his mind.

It was the ringing of a phone.

The fork tumbled from Thomas' hands. Why was the phone ringing? He couldn't remember ever having the external lines hooked up, not to mention that he'd never given anyone the num—

…no.

Thomas' hand shook. No. It couldn't be. There was one human being who knew the number. Thomas had always wanted to talk to him again, had always been willing to listen. He'd made it so that he could always be reached at a number he'd given to one man and one man only. And that had been a trick, making it so the call would register at his lab, his home, and his private lab when the number was dialed. Once, he'd hoped for this call to come in, hoped he could talk to him again like they had so many years before, as friends and comrades and coworkers. He'd believed at the time that the man was redeemable, before the depths of his madness became clear. Now the ringing of the phone was the last thing he wanted to hear.

No…

Not Wily.

The antiquated corded phone went silent after the seventh ring, before Thomas could reach it. It sounded again mere moments later. Thomas picked up the receiver like he believed at any moment it would whip around and bite him. He looked at the small screen on it. _I.D. unknown_, it read. Of course it would. The words identified the caller just as surely as if a name had appeared.

Thomas pressed the phone to his ear. His lips suddenly felt chapped, but he couldn't wet them, as all the moisture had left his mouth. His breathing, already constrained by his disease, shortened and lightened until it was barely perceptible.

"Hello," he said, voice audibly cracking.

"Good evening, Thomas."

The voice was just as Thomas had remembered—tinged by a vaguely Teutonic accent, and steady, though it promised it could become unsteady at any time. Perhaps it was just because Thomas was so familiar with the speaker, but he imagined he could hear even more in that voice. If he concentrated, he thought he could hear a hint of mania lurking just beneath the surface, but the voice was lucid, like the speaker was under no illusions about what he was. Thomas' heart fluttered like a hummingbird. "Dr. Wily," he replied.

"Oh, so formal. Come now, Thomas, I thought we were closer than that."

Thomas forced himself to swallow. "Albert," he managed.

"Much better. We have no need for titles or surnames between us. We know each other only too well."

Thomas had to agree and hated that fact. "I'm surprised you're not dead. I didn't think anything could survive…" He trailed off. The remainder of the sentence would have invoked the catastrophe that had killed Rock, and even now he couldn't bring himself to mention it.

"Well, let's just say that experience has taught me the virtues of being prepared."

Thomas shook his head as if to deny any of this was happening. "What do you want?"

"To chat, of course. That is why one makes a phone call."

"So what's on your mind?"

"Where are you, Thomas?"

"I could ask the same of you, Albert."

The renegade chuckled. "I trust you'll forgive my hypocrisy if I don't tell you. But I suppose that's not the real question. The real question is, what are you up to?"

"Up to?"

"Don't try and evade me, Thomas. You've been too honest for too long. You've forgotten how to lie."

"What makes you think I'm up to something?" Thomas said, and even he could hear the weakness in his voice.

"Now you're trying my patience. You made it totally clear—by vanishing. I'm so used to you being in the news, giving interviews, having discussions, working on some new wing of Light Labs… you disappearing was a dead giveaway. You're up to something, something you don't want other people to know about."

Thomas winced. "It's no concern of yours," he said, fully believing his words and hoping his conviction was audible.

"Oh, but it is," Albert answered, and an overtone of dark intensity crept into his voice. "It always is, just as my creations are your concern. When we're locked into a competitive cycle, as we are, every action of the one is of interest to the other."

"I don't want to play that game anymore, Albert. I'm done."

"No!" Anger flooded into Albert's voice. "It's not over until _I_ say it's over! This isn't a game, Thomas, and it never was."

"S-sorry," Thomas said, cowed a bit by Albert's outburst. "I'm just… I've got more important things to do than fight with you."

If Albert's voice had been a raging fire before, it was merely simmering now—but it was all the more threatening for being under control. "As always, you disrespect me. As always, you refuse to acknowledge me. No, Thomas. I am the most important thing in your life, just as you have been the most important thing in mine."

For a brief moment Thomas considered telling Albert about his disease… but wariness pulled him back. There was no telling how Albert would react to that information. Instead he said, "I've let that go, Albert. It just doesn't mean anything to me anymore."

The answer was low and menacing. "Then you wouldn't mind, I'm sure, if I sent out a few of my robots to rampage as they desire? If you're really so unconcerned."

Thomas sucked in a breath. "You'd do that? Just to… draw me out?"

"Without a second thought. Do you doubt me?"

"Never, Albert."

"Well, then, what shall it be? Tell me what you're working on, tell me when you'll be ready to fight again, or I'll let my robots persuade you."

Thomas readjusted his grip on the handset. It was slick with his sweat. His mind was racing, but not in any particular direction; it seemed as if everything was a white blur. There was no way to slow down, no way to escape.

Wily meant what he'd said. He would attack, and he'd let his robots keep attacking until Thomas responded to him, only Thomas couldn't respond because, among other things, he didn't actually _have_ a robot able to take the fight to Albert…

What was Albert really after? Thomas bent his intellect to the question and decided to bank everything on the answer. "You win," he said.

There was a long answering silence. When the voice replied, after many seconds, it was equal parts suspicion and disbelief. "What is that supposed to mean?"

"You win, Albert. You're the better roboticist. You always were. You're right, I am working on something. But it won't be ready for… a long time. I'm not ready to fight, so you win. You have nothing left to prove."

There was no noise from the other end except for almost comically exaggerated breathing. Thomas decided to continue. "So there's no need to spread havoc and chaos. You're the best, and you know it. If you were to try to take over the world, you'd succeed, because I can't stop you. But you don't need to, for the same reason."

"Damn you, Thomas," was the seething reply at last. "I can see what you're doing."

"Can you?" Thomas said weakly.

"How long have you known I'm dying?"

The words were a punch to the diaphragm to Thomas. On one level, he supposed he should have suspected, given Albert's age; but for the most part, the idea of the volatile, energetic, irrepressible Dr. Wily succumbing to something so trivial as _death_ made no sense. This was Dr. Wily! His destiny was to rule everything or flame out trying! But there was no doubting Albert's words, or the barely-controlled anguish in his voice. Thomas' mind had trouble comprehending the notion.

But the level of Thomas' brain that had fought Albert for so long did not succumb to shock or confusion. It smoothly picked up the conversation. "I've suspected for a while now. That's why you were so impatient. That's why some of your devices had such exploitable flaws—you were rushing. You should have known no one ever conquered the world with a beta version. Why the rush? Because even if you conquered the world you wouldn't have much time to rule it."

"And that's what you're betting on," Albert growled. "This is your scheme. You'll forfeit the present to win the future. You know that at best it won't be long before I die—then your next creation will storm out, undo my legacy, and secure your name forever. I'll be obliterated and forgotten. That's your endgame, I can see it!"

"Albert…"

"No! I won't allow it!"

A vision occurred to Thomas of Albert unleashing his rage unopposed. "Albert, don't do anything rash."

The answering voice was calmer than he'd expected. "Like what? Burn the world? I could, you know. I have the strength. But what would be the point? No, I know what to do. I'll reverse your plan. I'll leave my strongest agent behind when I die. I'll create the best fighting robot ever to exist. I'll place him in stasis to give you time to prepare. Then, when yours is ready, mine will emerge. They'll fight. The last one standing will secure his father's legacy. Why, that's borderline poetic."

Thomas sighed. "Why should we make another generation suffer for our feud?"

"'All the world's a stage, and all the people in it merely players.' We're the playwriters, Thomas, you and I. Everyone else will dance to our script, as they always have. So tell me: when will you be ready?"

Put on the spot, Thomas panicked. Time, he needed time, what's a long time? "Thirty years," he blurted out.

A long pause followed, during which Thomas could feel Albert's surprise. It had been such an impulsive thing to say—why thirty years? He didn't know how he would answer Albert if he asked…

"Good God, Thomas. Just what are you building?"

Thomas' shoulders sagged in relief. It was a question he could answer. "A robot that can think and feel with the fidelity of a human being," he said.

"Oh, that?" said Albert, voice rich in disappointment. "It'll take you thirty years to manage _that_? That's nothing special. My designs are practically there now."

"W-what?"

"You mean to say you didn't notice? Thomas, you wound me. I didn't just improve the bodies of each generation of my sons. I iterated their minds, too. Always tweaking, always improving. Even Splash Woman. I bet you never understood what I was doing with her, but she was an attempt to see how gendering would impact asexual robots. Why, my robots have had more mental sophistication than good old Rock for some time now. The champion I leave to battle yours… ah, he will be a masterpiece, yes. And he will have the ability to hate as I have hated. You wait and see."

Thomas couldn't respond. His hand was shaking so much the receiver rattled against his ear.

"So… thirty years, eh?"

"Yes," said Thomas blankly.

"Why so long?"

"Testing," Thomas mumbled.

"There's no way you'll be alive then."

"Which is why I have to give the testing more time to finish," he lied smoothly.

"Ha! And that's why you were always so slow. You demand too much certainty. It's a date, old friend."

"Alright, then."

"Thomas?"

"Yes?"

"Do you hate me?"

The question gave Thomas pause. A flash of anger did touch him, then—what gave Albert the right to pry like this? The feeling faded as quickly as it had come. "I suppose I should," he said. "You betrayed my trust… more than once. You've tried to destroy my home, you tried to kill me, and you… took my son."

"You killed my sons, too," Albert pointed out.

"If you cared about them so much, why send them out to war?"

"If you cared about your precious Rock so much, why send him?"

"Because that's what he chose!"

Albert didn't answer. Thomas couldn't tell if his words had struck home, or if Albert was trying to imply his robots had chosen war as Rock had. He shook his head to clear it. "I have every reason to hate you, I think. But… I don't. I'm an old man, Albert. I don't have it in me to hate anyone, anymore."

"That's really remarkable, Thomas."

"Is it?"

After a moment, Albert said, "I hate you, which I'm sure doesn't surprise you. I've hated you for a long, long time. But I suppose I also need to thank you. Our rivalry gave me motivation like nothing else could. It's because of you that my brilliance has reached full flower. If I'd conquered the world with our original Robot Masters, would I have ever bothered to build Quick Man or Shadow Man? To say nothing of Gamma or Bass! No, I do owe you a debt of sorts for that, as frustrating as it has been."

"You're… welcome?"

"Don't pat yourself on the back yet, Thomas. I need you to do me one more favor."

"What's that?"

"Make him _strong._ Whatever it is you're working on, make him as near perfect as your mind can conceive. Give him irresistible weaponry. Give him impregnable armor. Give him perfect reflexes. Give him unstoppable power. Give him sharp senses. Give him a cat's agility and an angel's grace. Give him a subtle mind and a razor wit. Above all, make him _strong_."

Thomas blinked repeatedly. Talking with Wily always left him confused as to the relative weights of brilliance and insanity. "But… why?"

"So that when my last son meets yours, my son has to earn his victory. I won't have him win cheaply, and as potent as he will be, that's a very real danger. He will reach his best, as I have done, only because of you and yours. So make your son strong, Thomas. It wouldn't do for our final clash to be one-sided."

Thomas nodded. "He'll be strong."

"Oh, good. And unlike me, I know you can be trusted to keep your word." Thomas heard his counterpart take a deep breath. "That should be all, then. You know, this may be the last time you hear my voice."

Against all reason, Thomas found himself wishing that it wouldn't be. "Goodbye, Albert."

"Goodbye, Thomas."

The line went dead. Thomas let the phone slip out of his hand. It clattered against the table.

All energy abandoned his body. He collapsed, haphazardly, into a chair. His mind continued to race as he tried to process all that had just happened. Not for the first time, Thomas wondered if Albert was some kind of divine punishment. He couldn't stay attached to the notion, though.

No crime was large enough for Dr. Wily to be a proportional punishment.

* * *

When next Thomas looked at the design for his final creation, a number of technical decisions became quite straightforward.

In went a matched pair of up-gunned Mega Busters.

In went the inscrutable Weapon Copy System, complete with fabricator arrays Thomas hoped would be sophisticated enough to copy weapons with a 30-year advantage on him.

In went combat routines so tightly optimized that the conscious, creative mind would always be free to operate.

In went ruggedized feet to absorb impacts and give traction against any surface.

In went a miraculously effective self-repair system, acute senses, a titanium-x exoskeleton to match a reinforced endoskeleton, shock absorbers, and emergency boosters with hover capability.

And in went a power storage and distribution system that could run all of those systems under the most severe combat conditions, with a little extra… just in case.

After Dr. Light submitted the specs for analysis and materials requisition, he felt a great weight of fatigue drape over him. Despair washed through him as he staggered to the bedroom. Even now, in the twilight of his life, all his dreams seemed to become nightmares.

* * *

_To be continued..._


	3. Seeing the Light

Thomas had always preferred building singular projects. Perhaps it was a bit of craftsman's vanity. When he was building a machine he knew would be mass produced, he had to follow a more rigid process. The design had to be complete before production started, since the initial build would test the construction process as much as it would produce the first model. When he was building a robot that would never be duplicated, he was freer to design and troubleshoot and build and tweak as he went along.

He felt no embarrassment in considering the process to be an artistic one.

Which was not the same as it being enjoyable, exactly. It was work, hard, hard work. A free-form construction process gave him flexibility, but it also put pressure on him to keep track of where every process was at. Integration of the build had to occur entirely within his own head. When something had to stop, or when something took longer than expected, he had to be able to wrap his head around all the second-order effects that resulted.

But he couldn't afford to do it any other way. There simply wasn't time.

He began to settle into the routine of dying. He set his alarm to wake him up at the same time each morning. He showered, both to wake him up and to provide a moment of white noise that helped him engage his thoughts. His meals were from one of three basic food groups: frozen, canned, and add-water-and-heat. Once he had food in his belly—not even necessarily a lot of food, as his appetite was tapering day by day—he went back to his lab. He'd review the results of any analysis or construction he'd set to run overnight. The first few hours after that set up new instructions for the manufacturing systems, before he sat down for serious skull sweat. He submerged himself in the details of X's design until hunger forced him to stop, which sometimes didn't happen until late afternoon. The evening alternated design work with testing and analysis. Before bed he would program a few more instructions into the construction equipment before turning in. Circuitry designs and programming concepts chased him into sleep, where he alternated between shoving all the covers off his body and needing all the covers he'd ever owned.

The silence began to get to him after a couple of weeks. He was, after all, a man who'd built robots to keep him company rather than be alone. He was unused to it, and feeling it made him believe he understood what had happened to Albert a little more. He began to play music in the background of his lab, but only at certain times; he found that the more abstract the design work he did the more he needed quiet.

Originality was giving him problems. Rock and Roll were able to react to stimuli in ways he hadn't foreseen, which was encouraging; but they'd fallen short when it came to new ideas or new thinking. They were reactive creatures, not proactive ones.

Inserting some randomness would help. The mechanisms were well practiced; random number generation, seen among programmers as something too important to leave to chance, was a highly refined capability. But translating that randomness into new behaviors was just as hard as it sounded.

Aesthetics were a problem. Creativity was a problem. Imagination was a problem—Rock could think of things that weren't, but he was limited to things that could be; a human's imagination could countenance anything, from the mundane to the fantastic.

Knowledge of human brains only helped so much. Humanity had long-since mapped where in the brain certain activities occurred, but it put them no closer to truly understanding how thoughts began or how they were processed.

And the emotions… oh, the emotions were hardest of all. For all the advances in programming, many made by Thomas himself, robots were still prone to being table-lookup machines. It was far too easy to fall into the old trap of correlating single inputs to single outputs. That logic didn't translate at all. The range of emotions was too wide and subtle for even a comprehensive table to cover. Moreover, emotions seldom traveled alone. Thomas had to find a way for a robot to understand that when red and yellow and blue mixed together, the result was not the greatest of the three, but all three mixed together and also separate at the same time.

So, weighing his obligation to Rock, dreading the last battle with Albert, and racing against the most final of deadlines, Thomas attacked all of these problems with every spark of genius still in him.

And day by day he died.

* * *

Thomas wondered if this was how insanity germinated. He had been adjusting the seals on X's joints that would keep them waterproof without compromising flexibility when he realized he hadn't been outside—hadn't even seen the sun—in weeks. What season was it? It had been November when he started, that he knew. What about now?

He ran a hand through his unkempt hair. He tried, unsuccessfully, to remember how many months it had been, and when that didn't work he tried to think in terms of weeks. That didn't work, either, because the days were no different. A Monday was as good as a Friday to him.

For a moment he felt intense disorientation. What was going on out there? Had Wily attacked after all? Were people looking for him? What was happening at Light Labs? He felt like an amputee trying to catch a ball with a hand that was no longer there.

The feeling passed. He settled down and returned his attention to his work. Ultimately, none of that mattered. He couldn't change it, and it wouldn't change what he was doing. He had to finish X before his body gave out on him. Trying to keep up with the outside world would do nothing but distract him. There was The Problem, and that had to be enough.

That was what he told himself, and what he believed. Yet a nag in the back of his brain reminded him that humans are social creatures. Alone like this, he was an unbalanced gyroscope, spinning in wider and wider arcs.

* * *

Thomas coughed onto the floor until clear liquid and spots of blood pooled in front of his face.

He tried and failed to make sense of what had just happened. He'd been working on X's optional helmet, ensuring that its additional sensors interfaced properly with X's head when it was worn, and then… the next thing he remembered he was on his hands and knees and coughing up a lung.

He slowly eased himself back until he was sitting on his feet. He toyed with the idea of standing, but his stomach lurched at the thought.

His disease was progressing faster than he'd expected. The doctors had given him a year, hadn't they? No, he remembered now. They'd only guaranteed him six months. It was a year if he cooperated, if he ate right and exercised and kept his stress to a minimum, so as to give his immune system a fighting chance.

So… that was a no-go on stress and exercise. At least he was eating a balanced diet—balanced, at least, if spam actually counted as meat, if the 'cheese' in boxed "macaroni and cheese" actually was cheese, and if the flecks of green he found floating in his ramen had actually been part of a vegetable at some point.

He had his doubts.

Getting to his feet took all his remaining energy. He stood, hunched over, breathing quickly but shallowly. His lungs didn't want to fully inflate anymore; it hurt to even try.

How much time did he need? It was so hard to tell in a project like this. The more radical the advance, the less certainty there could be in his timeline. He thought things were coming along nicely, but he still didn't know if what he was doing was even possible. He could test out individual parts and pieces, and that was useful in its way. Until the core came alive, though, until the first complete processor cycles checked out, there could be no reassurance that he could pull this off.

His mind lingered for a bit on Blues. Poor Blues… fatally, and magnificently, flawed from the moment of his activation. And even though he'd called himself Protoman, he wasn't the first. He was merely the first to survive waking up. No, there was definitely no assurance that any sort of timeline Thomas could dream up would stick.

If that was so, he needed every day he could scrounge up.

Oh, but eating right and exercising and relaxing, those were all things that took time. Time he didn't have. How many hours would he have to invest to buy an extra day? Diminishing returns…

He finally wrenched himself to a fully-standing position. He gave himself another week. If he stabilized, great. If not, if he'd gotten worse, he'd go to his fallback plan.

He coughed again, and considered starting his fallback plan immediately.

* * *

Thomas hadn't remembered a dream in years. The human brain is wired to forget such things at the end of its sleep cycle. When he woke in the middle of the night—sweating heavily despite having kicked off his sheets—the fragments of a dream stayed with him. Rock and X had been fighting, he thought. He couldn't remember how it had been going, but a part of him suspected only one outcome was possible.

Closing his eyes, Thomas tried to put such notions out of his mind. But it was too late. His brain was engaged and refused to allow him back to sleep.

It was a foregone conclusion what would happen if X and Rock fought, though of course they wouldn't. Even if Rock were alive, X wouldn't fight against him unless something happened. Right?

Doubt gnawed on Thomas' heart again. What kind of silly thing to think was that? What made X necessarily good? Sure, Thomas was programming ethics and philosophy into his creation. Sure, Thomas was trying to program a preference for peace into X, though he was aware of all the ways that could go catastrophically wrong. But that guaranteed nothing.

All the good that Thomas had been able to do thanks to Rock's protection would evaporate if X tore it down.

He was going around in circles, he knew. This was the same argument he'd had with himself before settling on his design. What kind of pacifist creates the world's strongest war machine, then tells it to go do whatever it wants? A bad one, that's what. Bad!

He groaned and, with effort, sat up in bed. If he truly wasn't going to be able to get back to sleep, he might as well try to resolve what had woken him. Was there some way to keep X as a moral being without stripping the very free will Thomas hoped to instill?

Thomas had decided at an earlier junction that X would have to be subject to the Three Laws of Robotics. Every robot of his era was, excepting those built by Dr. Wily. Even the original Robot Masters had been; part of Albert's reprogramming had been to remove those inhibitions. It was only natural for X to be, also.

But would X be able to override the gates?

The lab seemed so far away as Thomas dragged himself there. He wore only his nightgown; he hadn't thoughts enough to dress, and since it was still night and he should have been asleep he was in no mood to begin his morning routine.

The soft phosphorescence in the lab was still harsh to his bleary eyes. He waited for them to clear as his brain chewed over the problem. What to do, what to do…

His eyes flicked around the lab. Working with Mega Man had taught Thomas the virtues of modular construction. Rather than build by system, then try to cram all the systems within one shell, he built by body part, then integrated them together. It was a hard thing to do with an unfinished design, but that was one of the aspects of Thomas' genius even he didn't fully appreciate.

There, a dozen mechanical arms clicked and whirred above what would soon be X's legs. There, X's power storage and distribution center was beginning to come together; soon it would be mounted to his chestplate and work on the torso would begin in earnest. There, one of X's subprograms was compiling, though it took all of the computer's resources to accomplish the task.

None of it would matter if Thomas didn't get this problem right.

He smiled to himself. Oh, if only he'd had resources like these when he and Albert were working on the Robot Masters! It would have been so much quicker and easier. It actually staggered Thomas now to think about it. For all his disagreements with Albert, Thomas never doubted the caliber of his mind. Yet it had taken the two of them, combined, much longer to build those robots than it was now taking him, alone, to build X, and X was of such sophistication that they looked like building blocks in comparison…

Thomas' fingers, which he hadn't even noticed were drumming, stilled.

There was something here…

Thomas felt like he was on the edge of something. Something about the Robot Masters was pertinent here. There was a connection here, his subconscious mind swore by it, but his thinking mind couldn't quite grasp it.

What was so significant about the Robot Masters? They were almost painfully outmoded now. They were more powerful than previous robots, and more independent, but their programming was still limited. They only had so much flexibility and they were short on creativity. Oh, they had far more than any previous robots aside from Blues, that much was true, but compared to what even the same-generation Rock and Roll could do, their brains were constrained.

Constrained… how?

By the technology of the time, most of which Thomas and Albert had had to invent along the way, of course. And by the Three Laws, naturally. That was one of the built-in safeguards that had caused a hesitant government to permit their activation, though the scientists—much to Albert's rage—had had to prove it to them first.

Prove it…

Of course. When they'd build the Robot Masters, they'd had to demonstrate to a skeptical public that they were safe. So they'd built a simulator that hooked up to the Masters' latent brains. It allowed Thomas and Albert to push the Masters to make choices that tested the strength of the programmed safeguards. They'd programmed in a variety of situations that the Robot Masters had to navigate. When the Robot Masters made the "right" choice each time, the roboticists had claimed it proved their precautions were adequate.

If it could work once, it could work again.

Thomas called up his filing system on the main screen and dove in. An uneducated observer might have called it overgrown and overfull. The opposite was closer to the truth. When Thomas was working he endlessly iterated his designs, capturing the different tweaks and modifications in different files. The moment a previous version proved useless, he deleted it. The proportion of files that he saved long-term was very small. It was only because of the number of files he generated that so many got saved.

Thomas, in his philosophical moods, liked to think that he'd learned more than just robotics over his too-many years of life. Wisdom, an old wag once said, was the only compensation for getting old. Wisdom told him that his previous work was only as good as his way of getting to it. Large though his records were, they were also clearly labeled, extensively cross-referenced, and conscientiously backed-up. He'd reaped the rewards of having such a system before, and he was set to do so again.

There it was—a schematic of the testing machine. He was tempted to laugh, for one of the attached files was a scanned image of the paper drafts. That was right, he remembered now. He and Albert had been at the very end of their budgets and deadlines for the Robot Master contract, so they'd sketched out the first plans and diagrams long-hand. They'd only recorded the final design after the fact; they'd built the machine from their old-fashioned paper doodles. That was all they'd needed. They'd been so in-tune, both with their joint project and with each other, that doodles and a little conversation were enough to fully germinate the project.

If Thomas looked closely, he could actually tell which parts he'd drawn and which were Albert's. Albert's portions were clean, bold, and dark; there was something very definite about his writing. That, Thomas decided, was in-character. Albert had always seen construction as an act of will. He saw himself as the voice in the wilderness crying out to an uncaring universe "THIS IS!"—and making it happen, through sheer perverse determination. While Thomas thought this was a bit over-the-top, he also envied Albert in a way. The completion of an invention seemed to bring Albert real joy… or at least vindication, which was as close to joy as his damaged soul could experience.

The glow of melancholy and nostalgia faded beneath the relentless grind of fatigue. He was in no shape to redesign the tube now. It would have to be enough that Thomas had his answer.

He shambled back towards his bedroom. So, he thought through the haze of sleep, now he knew what he'd use to test X's morality. That was only half of it, of course. The interface would need updating and, more importantly, he'd have to rewrite a good part of the programming. It would need to be more comprehensive than what the Masters had faced, more subtle, more nuanced. For the Masters, ironclad directives rigidly applied were enough. X would see a larger variety of situations while emotions colored his perceptions. It would take a long time to fully exercise it all.

Thomas would certainly be dead before it was done.

The notion made him pause as he was climbing into bed. X would wake in a world where Thomas was dead. Thomas wouldn't be there to see the changes his son would bring. It was a depressing thought.

In that case, there was no sense in trying to rush the schedule. If Thomas was going to be dead before X's maturation anyway, it was only reasonable to spend enough time for that maturation to complete.

As sleep reclaimed Thomas, he realized that X would have thirty years to get it right.

* * *

Law cannot limit that which physics makes possible.

Thomas tried to remember where he'd read that phrase. It'd had something to do with aerial bombing, he was sure. As his lab equipment put the finishing touches on X's plasma busters, Thomas felt some measure of guilt. How different was he from Albert, really?

Out there in the great big world plenty of people had plenty of weapons. Societies had tried all sorts of different arrangements for judging who could get what weapons. Some societies gave weapons to everyone. Some societies took weapons away from everyone. Everything in-between had been tried, as well. Never was everyone satisfied; rarely was even a majority satisfied. And here Thomas was building a son with weaponry that trumped it all. He allowed no law to bound him in this pursuit; the only limitations were the ones he placed upon himself. That, essentially, was how Albert had been operating all this time.

Thomas grimaced but didn't stop the machinery. It would be alright, wouldn't it, if he just aimed X in the right direction? Merely having a weapon wasn't evil, right? Thomas knew that argument wouldn't convince everyone. To a certain kind of thinking, X _was_ a weapon.

But Thomas couldn't sympathize with that. He knew the argument was there, but he couldn't make it to himself. He had tried, and failed. Even though X was still merely parts and plans and an idea, to Thomas' mind he was a person, his son. He could—would—defend his son against any counter-argument, out of paternalism alone.

He wouldn't be there, though, would he? He wouldn't be able to defend X when it really mattered—that is, when he awoke. Much as Thomas hoped his son would be able to live without the burden of expectations or the pressures of the world, he knew that hope was forlorn. X would have more attention focused on him than he would know what to do with.

What would the future do with his poor boy?

Thomas felt as if his heart was clenching up in his chest. He began to understand what a father feels like when he sees his child get on the bus to go to school for the first time. It was worse for him, he thought, because there was no assurance that anyone in the future would have X's best interests in mind, and there would be no coming home at the end of the school day; X would be on his own.

And that, almost as much as the looming threat of Albert's final weapon, convinced Thomas that he was justified in giving his son so much power. Normal people didn't have power like that, at least not when they were born, but no normal person would be subject to what X would have to deal with.

If only he could do something to make his son's existence less, well, political…

There was only one thing: fail. Only if X were unremarkable would he escape notice. But that went against the whole point of building him. It was a good thing the machines building X knew nothing but construction, and another good thing they couldn't doubt as Thomas doubted. They'd have tied themselves in knots by now.

So he chased his thoughts down one rabbit hole after another. From time to time a part of his brain tried to intervene by pointing out he had no time for such pursuits; the occasional cough reinforced this message. Yet it washed away like a sand carving at high tide.

He would have sat there for hours if the construction system hadn't stopped. He looked up and saw the report: the arms were complete. Grateful for the change of pace, he sent them to the testing range.

The room was large, rectangular, heavily reinforced, and all but empty. It took Thomas several minutes to arrange the rig he needed to support X's arms, and then several more minutes to set up their connection to the lab's power grid. He'd already taken care of the programming. All he needed to do was add power and the busters would fire a sequence of shots.

Thomas also had the targets prepared: a series of three, each more durable than the last, based on enemies Rock had faced in his many adventures. Thomas had calculated the extra output X's busters would emit and had hardened the targets' backstops to compensate.

He threw the switch. Power cut in to both arms, which hummed gently as they came to life. Almost faster than Thomas could see, the fingers vanished and the emitters for the busters appeared. He nodded—so far, so good.

Two bolts of plasma, small only by the busters' own standards, hit the first target. They punched through it, blew it apart, and scored the target's backstop. Thomas nodded appreciatively as the first target dropped to reveal the second. The busters charged to a higher level of potency and fired again. The target was woefully overmatched. The glare of the impact made Thomas wince. When his eyes refocused, he gasped. The busters had not only disintegrated the target, but they'd torn into the backstop and shattered it. That meant the busters' output was significantly higher than he'd predicted—meaning that the final, fully-charged shot would be…

The lights in the lab dimmed for a moment as the busters siphoned off more and more current. Thomas reached to kill the power—and his eyes, automatically widening because of the dimming light, were caught unprepared by the sudden release of the two miniature suns.

Pain replaced thought. Thomas' eyes couldn't shut themselves as tightly as they felt they needed. He flailed blindly for the switch to stop the experiment, forgetting that it was already shutting down as he'd programmed it to do. Even in the darkness of his squeezed-shut eyelids he couldn't escape the blinding after-images of searing light. A pulse of warmth washed over him, followed by a rush of cold air, none of which he noticed.

It was several minutes before he was able to coax his eyes open again, and several after that before they'd recovered enough for him to see clearly. When at last they were clear of tears and vaguely refocused, he looked down the firing range. His breath caught in his throat: not only had the fully-charged buster shots blown through the target and its backstop, they'd punched a hole in the wall beyond, opening the range to the mountain.

This was the power he was leaving his son, he thought numbly.

How had this happened? Hadn't he designed these busters? Hadn't he calculated their maximum output before the first circuit was soldered? How could he have been so wrong?

A chill swept over him that had nothing to do with the mountain air. What else was he wrong about in X's design? If he could be so wrong about something he should have been able to rigorously control, how could he trust his designs of the more esoteric components?

X's power was going to be even greater than Thomas had expected. Impressive as those busters had been, they were firing dumbly at targets. How much more dangerous would they be when mounted on a supremely mobile platform that was also a tactical genius…

Thomas thoughtlessly gave the commands to send the arms back upstairs. He didn't know really what to do about the breach in the compound, but the door sealing off the range was heavy and seemed to block most of the intruding cold, so he let it be. He returned to the primary lab and plopped down in his chair again.

A picture of X's notional face looked back at him. His eyes were deep, his expression peaceful. Thomas ached to do everything he could for him. Wily's words haunted him—_make him strong_. When it came to Wily's last son, the gloves would have to come off. Thomas' mistake with the busters worked in X's favor, since X would need every smidgen of firepower he could get. But for any other application, X would be a monster, a god amongst men.

Thomas remembered how Rock had felt alone, sometimes. He'd fought to save humanity, and succeeded, but the same power that let him win his wars isolated him. It wasn't healthy. Roll and Thomas had helped keep him steady, but there was still an effect.

How much more effect would there be with a being so much more powerful, yet so much more vulnerable to the emotional tolls of isolation?

Thomas chewed the insides of his mouth. He came to a conclusion. Swift fingers began developing a throttling function. For his own sake, and the sake of those around him, X's power would be reduced… at first. X would be able to override the barriers to tap into his true power, but only under certain conditions. Hopefully, by then, he'd be able to find a support system, find people who cared for him and would be able to help him. If only X could find such people on his own, since Thomas wouldn't be there…

He frowned at himself. More was needed. He _could_ be there, in a sense.

Yes. That was it. Imbed a message for X to see when he overrode the limits. Extra condition: X had to be out-of-combat before the message played… no sense in granting X extra power, but then distracting him mid-fight…

Thomas took some time to prepare his speech. He didn't want to make a habit of this—didn't want X to always be looking for the next clue, the next direction. Thomas knew there was no way he'd be able to write a script for X's life, knew he didn't even want to, knew he'd be angry with himself if X tried to follow it. One message—that would be all. Let X figure the rest out on his own.

He began recording.

"X, I gave you the ability to choose your own path through life, and I hoped the world would let you choose a peaceful one. But it seems now that you were destined to fight. Because I thought the world might need a new champion, I gave you great power—enough to become the most powerful force the world has ever known.

"You're hearing this now because you've unlocked that power. I want you to know that I believe in you. I believe you will use this power to make this world a better place for humans and robots alike.

"I know you will make me proud."

With a trembling hand, Thomas stopped the recording. There was nothing left to do but hope.

* * *

_To be continued..._


	4. Biting the Bullet

"…at?"

Roll blinked. Disorientation overtook her for a moment, as things were different from her last perceptions. Dr. Light was gone, the seasons and lights had changed, even the smell was different—mustier, unlived-in. And there was a weight on her shoulder…

She heard a click sound, the type she normally associated with compartments of robots going open or shut, and then the weight on her shoulder resolved into a bird dropping to the ground in front of her. It was clearly a robotic bird; for a moment its baby blue color reminded her of one of Dr. Light's later creations. But while Beat had resembled a beach ball with a beak and wings, a rugged design made for combat, this machine was spindly and light. It faced Roll, and then a hologram appeared from a projector around its neck.

"Roll, I am so very sorry about this. I never wanted for you to feel the pain of watching me suffer. But… I need your help. I need you to come to my personal lab. The messenger I sent to you knows the way. Please, Roll. No one else can help me with this."

"Of course," she whispered as the hologram vanished. "Whatever you need."

* * *

"Dr. Light!" Roll cried as she sprinted towards her creator.

"Gently, gently," he said warily. She reined herself in and gave him a moderate hug. "That's better. Thank you for coming."

"Of course I would come," she answered, voice full of affection. She pulled back to look at his face. "Why wouldn't I?"

A frown flickered over his face, so quickly that—were her memory not flawless—she would have doubted it had ever been there. "Well, I'm glad, anyway," he said. "I need your help."

"With what?"

He sighed. "I'm not taking care of myself, Roll. I've been extremely busy and it's taking a toll."

"Just like always," she clucked, though with a bright expression on her face. "You let yourself operate in the intellectual plane and you forget about everything else."

"What else could there be? This passing world's a dream, isn't it?" he said lightly.

"I don't know about that," she said. "I don't dream, and things seem real enough to me."

"Ah, but that just means you have no basis for comparison," he replied.

She frowned as her mind tried to stretch enough to keep up with the conversation. Intellectual power was never the problem, but Thomas had pushed her imagination to its limits. Again she noted an emotion cross his face before vanishing. "I'm sorry," she blurted. "I tried to stay with you, it's just hard for me…"

"Now now," he said, caressing her softly. "Don't you fret. I'm just happy to talk to you." Relief washed over her. Her reaction must have been visible to Dr. Light, because he responded with a smile. "That's better. Now come this way. I have someone I'd like for you to meet."

Construction work was ongoing in the lab. Roll could see that several major assemblies were complete; what work remained was small and subtle. The mechanical arms were using their most delicate appendages and tools as they rooted around inside shells and panels.

She looked at all the pieces under construction. Her mind compared them to ones she'd already seen. There was correlation there, in some places, but it was clearly a new design. Her eyes settled upon the main computer screen, where the new robot's face was modeled. It was designed to look young, but only partially succeeded. "Mature" was the word that sprang to her mind. Youthful and mature? Yes, like a twenty-year-old who's had to be a surrogate father since he was twelve.

"Who is it?" she asked.

Dr. Light seemed pleased with the question. "That's X," he said. His pride was audible.

"X? Like a variable?" she asked. Suspicion crossed her mind. "You couldn't think of an actual name, could you?"

"No," he said with chagrin. "I told myself 'X' was just a placeholder until I came up with something better, but I've called him that for so long I can't imagine him having any other name. And if I did change names, I'd have to re-record the message I left him."

"The message…" her mind quickly followed the line of reasoning. Her shoulders slumped as she reached the implication. "He's not going to be ready, is he? Before you…"

"No," he said when she failed to complete her sentence. "He won't. It's going to be a long time before he's ready. For that matter, _you_ might not…"

It was her turn to guess after his meaning. "Are you saying that I'll have stopped functioning before he comes online?" she said, her tone as neutral as her choice of words.

"Maybe. It depends upon the quality of the maintenance and care you get after I'm gone."

The construction robots in the lab supplied enough sound for the room to not be silent. Yet they still seemed strangely dulled, as if the sound didn't dare intrude on this moment between Dr. Light and Roll. A thought occurred to Roll that humans were often characterized as 'social creatures'. "No man is an island", that was the saying humans used to explain it, and Roll had to take their word for it. But it was only partly true, wasn't it? A human being _could_ exist on its own, take care of itself, be self-sufficient. It might be strange or uncomfortable, but it was possible. Not for a robot. A robot's survival depended completely upon the same infrastructure that birthed it.

"Dr. Light," she said in carefully expressionless tones, "no one's going to take care of me when you die, will they?"

"I will not leave you at the mercy of strangers," he said firmly. "I included an open-ended conditional in my will. The technicians at Light Labs will see to your care, for as long as you desire."

"So I would dictate my own lifespan?"

"To some extent. Your neural pathways will decay eventually, but not any time soon. If I do say so myself, I did a good job with you."

Her face turned pensive as she struggled with the problem. "I… I don't know why… I would want to go on living," she said. "I don't know what purpose that would fulfill."

She saw his shoulders heave in a sigh. "I thought you'd say that," he said tiredly. "And that's my fault, again. I did wrong by you. I just hoped… maybe…" he shook his head. "But that's why I felt the need to build X."

She shook off her confusion—unlike Rock and Protoman, who were brooding creatures, she couldn't hold on to negative emotions for long—and stepped closer as he pulled up more details of the plans. "You gave him a lot of power," she said.

Dr. Light winced. "That was the first thing you noticed, eh? Of course it would be. That's the obvious part, and what's truly special about him is obscure. It's too hard to grasp from the design alone. Him having a lot of power… that was a secondary thing, not the reason I started this project. My goal is for X to choose his own path. He can define his own purpose."

Roll frowned. "I don't understand," she said.

"Well… think about the Robot Masters. What if Gutsman wanted to do electrical work, like Elecman?"

"Why would he?" she said, growing more confused. Her logic filters were beginning to complain about where this conversation was going.

Early AI designs had on occasion been talked to death by humans. When presented with paradoxes or nonsense, the AIs had become trapped in endless processing loops as they attempted to resolve unsolvable problems. One of Thomas and Albert's earliest designs had suffered a nervous breakdown simply from viewing an Escher painting.

Roll was more advanced than that. Her logic filters were designed to keep her electronic brain hygienic by screening such things from her perception, or by kicking them out of active processing. It was only afterwards that Thomas had realized that, even if Roll had had much of an imagination, such filters would cripple it. Yet another problem to solve with X, yet another leap into the unknown.

He could see her struggling with his words. "Just imagine that Gutsman preferred doing electrical work."

"But that doesn't make sense. He's completely unsuited for it. His programming and construction were tailored specifically for construction. He wouldn't know how."

"He could learn, couldn't he? We could add in additional programming."

This was nebulous territory for Roll. "Then… he wouldn't be Gutsman anymore, would he?"

"Now we're at the heart of the matter! Every part of the Robot Masters was defined ahead of time, from their personalities to their capabilities to their preferences. Their development from that was limited, and only in directly related ways, outgrowths, if you will, of their primary functions. You're right, Gutsman would never want to do electrical work. That choice didn't exist for him. Now that I think about it, Rock's becoming Mega Man was really an extension of his role as my lab assistant. He was cleaning up an experiment gone awry. And when Wily attacked again, well, by that time he'd already become Mega Man, so fighting back was now within his scope. He had changed.

"Well, that's closer to how humans are. We can adapt and change, and we take into ourselves new skills and experiences. We even seek out new things for just this reason. There is variation here; some people are more rigid than others, some more fluid… but it's a characteristic we all share, and that robots don't really have. Until now."

Roll cast about for something to support her. It would have been easier to explain to a fish how there could be such a thing as _no water_. "So… he could talk philosophy with you, then?"

"He could more than talk philosophy. He could live it. Redefine it, even."

Too much. Roll's brain failed safe. She smiled brightly and said, "It's important to you, so I hope for the best!"

Dr. Light chuckled. "Thank you, Roll."

"How can I help?"

"I need you to take care of an old man," he said. "My eating habits and sleep patterns have been wretched lately, my hygiene has suffered, and I hurt all the time. All of that is costing me time… and I need every day. I wish I could say I'm confident in how far I've come, but I'm not. There's still so much to do…"

"Dr. Light," Roll said happily, "if there's one thing in this world I know, it's domestic service. Leave it to me!"

He gave her a genuine smile and began to speak, but coughing overcame him. She was at his side in an instant, supporting his torso to keep it upright even through the worst of his hacking. When he pulled his hand away from his mouth, it was speckled red.

"Is that…" she began to ask before Thomas wiped his hand on his lab coat. That drew Roll's attention to the brownish splotches here and there on the coat. Realization hit, with disapproval hot on its heels. "Oh, no you don't," she chided. "That's highly unsanitary. Off with it." When he was slow to comply, she took manners into her own hands. Gently but irresistibly she guided the coat off of his shoulders. The white undershirt beneath was smelly and stained. "Dr. Light!"

He gave a combination grimace and sheepish smile. "This probably proves that I need help," he said.

She shook her head. "I'll go and get a new lab coat and shirt. You do have spares here, right?" The expression he gave her was not reassuring; she couldn't immediately tell whether it meant 'no' or 'yes but they're all just as dirty' or even 'yes but I can't find them'. "You can wear that shirt until I get back. I'll find my way around, it should only take one circuit for me to learn the layout."

She walked out. Her expression was actually happy. For the first time in a while her heart was light.

* * *

With Roll there to help him, the quality of Thomas' life improved dramatically. Roll took the meager food available and did amazing things with it, caught up with his laundry completely, forced him to maintain his personal hygiene (by threatening to help him if he didn't), and kept him sane.

More or less.

Because he was beginning to believe the entire project was insanity.

Even with Roll taking care of his body, his mind began to break down. He spent an entire day doing nothing but recapitulating the design decisions that he'd made. He permitted Roll to spoon him food but otherwise did no physical actions that day of his own volition.

A week later he was all smiles and jokes, which was almost as unnerving to Roll as his depression had been, and then proved his unevenness when he went into a furious rage in his lab, declaiming how his equipment was ruining his son, how there was no way his son could emerge in any good shape when his conception was so soiled, how he knew just KNEW that disaster was around the corner and it might be better if X never woke up…

Two days after that he sobbed inconsolably for hours. When he was coherent, he told her that it was all impossible, that there was no way free will and deliberate construction could coincide. And whenever he said that he immediately began calling for Rock and begging his forgiveness, oblivious to the way such words tore through her vulnerable feelings for the dead robot.

The strain upon poor Roll escalated quickly. The subtleties of human emotion were simply beyond her, no matter how hard she tried. She hadn't imagination enough to understand what was happening. So she bore the burden of Thomas' coming apart, stoically, as he cycled through the gamut from ecstasy to despair. And even as it caused her pain, she nevertheless found some virtue in it.

Roll held on with a martyr's resolve, hoping that her presence would bring some measure of solace to the man.

This wasn't the first time. She'd been with him any number of times he'd been suffering. The first time had been after Rock's first defeat of Wily. Dr. Light had held himself together all throughout that first war—there'd been no choice, there wasn't time during those frantic days to indulge their emotions. Afterwards, though, when Wily had vowed revenge, and a grievously wounded Mega Man was lying unconscious as Dr. Light's repair bots serviced him… then, everything had caught up to Dr. Light at once. Roll had been there for him.

As the wars dragged on and on, Dr. Light had for a time succumbed to his anger. He had seriously considered the idea of modifying Rock's programming. If he'd removed the requirement in Rock's brain to obey the Three Laws of Robotics, it would have freed his son to kill Wily and finally stop the wars. For weeks he'd agonized over the proposition. When Wily attacked again, he actually sent Rock forth with the request that he kill Wily. He hadn't made the programming change, however, and so of course Rock didn't. Rock had never told her—or anyone—what he was thinking during those dark days. Nevertheless, the backwash of guilt Dr. Light had felt in the aftermath of those events had nearly destroyed him. But Roll had been there for him.

Then, in the last war, Rock had died. It would have been hard to deal more of a blow to Dr. Light. Despite her own sorrows, Roll had been there for him.

She recognized that humans had the ability to feel each other's emotions—sympathy, it was called. She knew enough about it to know she didn't have it. She had to think it was a programming limitation. Even lacking sympathy, she could recognize when a human was experiencing intense emotion, and guess at what it was. And though she could never feel Dr. Light's emotions as if they were her own, she did feel bad when she saw Dr. Light in pain.

But it would be worth it. If ever her presence had helped him, even a little, then her purpose was fulfilled.

There wasn't much to her, she supposed. Her desires were so very petty. Her threshold for fulfillment was low. It was so hard to tell if even such a low threshold had been met, because his oscillations were getting wider and wider even as his genius reached new peaks.

And it _was_ reaching higher, ever higher. She could tell that from what she saw. No problem was able to stop him for long, and the complexity that had long-since blown Roll's mind offered Dr. Light no discernible resistance. Whether he greeted each new breakthrough with exhilaration or apathy, with triumphalism or disdain, she appreciated each one as a revelation.

Such revelations came at a cost. She began to understand what was happening to him when, one morning, he staggered into the lab a good two hours before he was normally even awake. "Up early, aren't you?" said Roll, her vocal processors carefully producing the sounds she'd determined were most likely to keep him cheery.

The sight that greeted her eyes changed her voice instantly. Dr. Light's skin was so pale it was as if he'd been bleached. Sweat gave his body a too-bright sheen that made him seem even lighter. And on the front of his freshly-washed nightshirt was a quickly browning, ragged wedge of blood.

"Back to bed," she said firmly.

"No!" Dr. Light rasped. "Stop, Second Law, obey!"

She had stood to escort him back to his room; at his words she froze in place. He'd spoken directly to the logic processors in her head that enforced the Three Laws of Robotics, blowing away any possibility of interpretation or disregard. _A robot shall obey the orders of a human being, except when this would violate the First Law._ Her eyes moistened as she tried to convey her confusion. When she spoke, it was with a motionless face. "Why?" she said mournfully. "I don't understand."

"I can't let you stop me," he said. "I know I brought you here to try and keep me healthy and safe, but… but I'm out of time! Look at me!" He was gasping for breaths. By the wheezing she could count his breaths. They were shallow and far, far too numerous to be healthy. But then he wasn't healthy, was he? "Look at me!"

"I'm sorry," she said, eyes watering further. "I've failed you, haven't I?"

He stood there, suspended on the balls of his feet, almost vibrating from anxiety, before weariness and regret overtook him. He slouched over. "No, you haven't. I shouldn't have done that. You're doing everything I could have asked for, and I... This… isn't like me…"

She watched, helplessly, as he sagged. Muscles that had lost their strength let him down. As his body drooped, coughing overcame him again. The cough sent a fine red spray into the air before his body bowed over. He fell to his knees, then his side.

Roll tracked him with eyes alone. She felt like someone was taking a razorblade to her heart. There was Dr. Light, suffering, dying, and she couldn't do anything about it.

She grasped fully now why he'd deactivated her before, and what a wrench it must have been for him to call her back at the end. He had sympathy, and so he knew what she must be feeling, with the added poison of responsibility. It was pain, not his illness, that had dragged him to the ground.

The coughing ceased. He groaned, but didn't stir.

"Please!" she called to him.

He shifted at the sound of her voice, as if he'd completely forgotten she was there. He probably had. "Come," he said. His voice was wet and weak.

Released, she was with him in a flash. "We need to get you upright," she said, untangling him gently. "You have been sleeping upright, haven't you?"

"'ts hard. Hurts my back."

"Oh, Dr. Light, we talked about this!" She maneuvered him until his back was against the wall. His eyes were closed, and all his faculties seemed to be concentrated on breathing, except for one hand that was grasping at something she couldn't perceive. "If you want me to take care of you, you have to do what I say."

"I'm not going to make it," he breathed.

She placed an ear against his chest. "Nonsense. You're doing just… well, you're not dying soon. Most of each lung still works."

"No… I mean… I won't make it with X. He won't be done. My son will be… stillborn."

Stillborn. There were terms, Roll knew, that humans invested with a great deal of import. From the raw emotion that spilled from Dr. Light with the word, she guessed this was one such. Her mind leapt to the why. The prototypes. Those immature beings that had existed before Blues' successful activation, the ones that had never woken up because Light and Wily had pushed so far so fast that they'd reached into the great unknown where failure was all but certain. Dr. Light felt like he was there again, but this time, there would be no second chance. This was it. And he didn't think he could do it.

It was another blow, to know he felt this way. "I'm sure you'll get it done in time. Even yesterday you were as amazing as ever."

"I'm slowing down."

"Nonsense."

"I know my mind better than anyone," Dr. Light said, and Roll could not gainsay him. "I'm slowing down. It's not enough. I'm going places I never thought possible, reaching past all previous limits, and… and it's still not enough. Too slow, too stupid, too… too…"

Roll was not about to supply a superlative for that list. "I believe in you."

"As comforting as that is, it won't help." He breathed heavily a few times. Alarm raised in her system when she realized that he was out of breath. _Talking_ exhausted him. How much longer could he last like this?

"Are you in pain now?" she asked, casting desperately for something she could affect.

"Am I… Roll, I'm always in pain!" he said. "It wasn't so bad at first, but… in the last… month, I guess? Every day it's worse."

"Well, we'll put you on some pain meds, then," she said cheerily.

"No! Why do… do you think I'm not taking them already?" More heavy breaths from his outburst. "I must remain lucid. I can't have medications fogging things up, or they're doing more harm than good."

"There are pain medicines that don't affect brain chemistry."

"I don't know how much that'd do for me."

She frowned. "That's not really the reason, is it? No… it's because you would have had to leave here to get them," she said.

He looked up at her in surprise, then almost chuckled. "Well, that was part of it. I was taking generic acetaminophen, but I ran out weeks ago."

"You really didn't do yourself any favors. I'm here now, though, so I'll take care of it. I'll find you some non-narcotic pain meds. Acetaminophen or ibuprofen, if nothing else. And you'll agree to take it, not deny it on the grounds that the pain gives you some imagined sense of urgency. I think you're feeling more urgency than you need to be feeling, to be frank."

"Okay."

"Now, let's stand." Despite his weakness, Roll nearly hauled him off of his feet—the doctor's famous fat was melting day by day. "And we'll take you back to bed."

"No good, my mind's engaged now. I wouldn't sleep. Take me to the main computer."

Roll complied. She gingerly sat him down. "You'll need something to help you focus, then. Coffee? Tea?"

"Tea. I can't stomach coffee anymore."

"I'll be back with it in a minute."

Dr. Light sighed. "It doesn't matter, anyway."

"If it helps you feel better, then it matters to me."

"No, I don't mean the tea." He looked down at the hands in his lap. The posture accentuated the circles under his eyes, which stood in stark contrast to his albino-like skin. "Even if I'm able to put the finishing touches on X before I die, that's not going to be enough."

"What more is needed?" Roll asked, puzzled. "At that point you can just turn him on and you're done."

Dr. Light gaped at her, then—to her growing confusion—laughed. "Oh, my. I forgot. I'm sorry Roll. See, in my mind I had already solved the problem, so I didn't realize I hadn't told you. X isn't going to be activated immediately upon completion. I need to test out his systems. I've designed a capsule to hold him during that time. In fact I've already recorded the message that will greet whomever finds the capsule to unlock it. It's supposed to survive for thirty years. Building it won't be a problem, but there's more to it than that. The capsule needs to be prepared, have X put in it, and be hidden so no one disturbs it prematurely."

Roll could sense incompleteness in his words. "But?"

He grimaced. "I won't survive long enough to do those things. Even if I finish X before I expire—and that's by no means a sure thing—I won't be able to do all of that."

"Then I will."

Roll had to smile upon seeing Dr. Light's surprised expression. "What? You think I could put all this effort into this project and not want to see it through? I want to see my baby brother come alive! I have more than enough patience to babysit a capsule. Anyway, it'll give me a reason to still be alive after you're not."

The barest hint of color entered Dr. Light's face. Roll realized she'd embarrassed him, somehow. So she followed up, "It's the only logical solution."

"And it is so very straightforward. I'm glad you thought of it."

"I think simple very well," she said. She found his expression inscrutable.

"I'm sorry about all of this."

"Don't be. I could use a purpose. You can fill me in on what I need to do later. For now, you've got a son to build!"

Her exuberance won him over. He cracked a slight smile. "Yes. Yes I do."

* * *

_To be continued..._


	5. Passing On

X's body came together. Power was applied to piece after piece until the hardware was confirmed to be complete. The integration process went as smoothly as could be hoped for. All that remained was the mind.

Roll began walking Dr. Light back and forth from lab to bed. By the time he no longer had strength enough even for that, she'd already procured a wheelchair for him. His trajectory was clear.

"I have very little imagination," she said, "but it seems to me that you and X share a life."

"What do you mean?" Dr. Light said in surprise.

"You're getting weaker and weaker, but he's getting stronger and stronger—more complete, at least. You're pouring all that you have into him. You're sacrificing your life to give him his. It's like there's only enough life for one of you at a time."

He chuckled, though the sound was almost indistinguishable from a cough. "You're quite the romantic, Roll."

"I suppose. I know things don't actually work like that. The world would be a very different place if they did. And my logic processors tell me that you'd be dying whether you were making X or not. Still, even when we know our eyes mislead us, it's easy to believe them."

Dr. Light chuckled. "That's an impressive degree of self-awareness, actually. You know, the Robot Masters were classified as "intelligent automata" rather than people. You and Rock—you started out with more mental abilities than the Masters, but you were of the same generation, at least, and legally I think you fall into the same category, even with your upgrades and the way you've grown. But… somehow, that strikes me as not quite right. The Masters could experience cognitive dissonance, but they weren't… smart enough, or, or aware enough to understand what was happening to them. They had to fall back on prior programming to tell them which input to trust. You and Rock could recognize what was happening to you, and make an intelligent choice."

She nodded. "Should that make me feel proud, to be complimented like that? I think it shouldn't. It's not like I did anything to have that ability. That's just how I was built."

Another chuckle. "People could learn from your humility, Roll. Did you know, that's one of the ideas that killed slavery?"

"What do you mean?"

"'We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal…' Whatever differences between us exist, whatever strengths or weaknesses or talents or abilities we're born with, all of it comes from God. And because we're all equal in the eyes of God, we all deserve equal rights. Of course, it took men another hundred years before they decided black men were men, too, and another hundred after _that_ before they decided that women were also "men". Some still haven't." He sighed. "How long, I wonder… how long will it be before poor X, who is nearly as human as I am, is recognized as such?"

"…that's rhetorical, right?"

"Hm? Oh, of course. You weren't actually doing calculations were you?"

"I'd started."

"Don't worry about it."

"If the pattern you cited holds, wouldn't the answer be around a hundred years?"

Dr. Light grimaced. "I shudder to think of what X will have to endure over a hundred years."

Roll blinked in surprise. "Will he live that long?"

"Well, I can't guarantee anything, but he'll have the ability to, at least. It all depends on how he manages his memory and how well his system can synthesize parts. Who knows what his actual lifespan will be?"

"I'd say, if you and him do share a life, he'll live at least as long as you lived. And you know, maybe he'll find someone to give his life to. It's like Hinduism, isn't it? One life passed from body to body?"

Dr. Light shook his head. "What would it say about my karma if I were reincarnated as a robot?"

"Huh." Roll puzzled over that one. "I have no idea."

"Neither do I."

They worked on.

Dr. Light faded week by week, day by day. Soon he was too weak to leave bed, even with a wheelchair and Roll helping him. His body shriveled. Roll forced fluids upon him. He accepted them resentfully, as his appetite had vanished. His sweating intensified; his body temperature fluctuated broadly from feverish to chilled and back. He developed shaking in his hands. He popped painkillers with reckless abandon. When Roll tried to stop him, invoking the First Law, he overrode her on the grounds that his lungs would kill him long before he damaged his liver enough to notice. He coughed up blood so frequently that the tang of iron rarely left his mouth, and a red-brown stain colored his otherwise chalky chin. He dreaded when Roll used the term "sponge bath". He was withering creature, wretched, obviously dying and always in pain.

And his mind burned ever brighter despite it all.

The difference between day and night receded. He slipped from consciousness to unconsciousness without much distinction, adrift as he was in a sea of programming problems and function calls and recursive algorithms. When he was awake, he was typing (or, later, dictating to Roll); when he slept, his mind gently coasted along the same lines, such that when he woke he was able to continue working as if no interruption had occurred. More than once Roll found herself waiting for him to complete a sentence only to discover he'd passed out. Just as frequently he would come around in mid-sentence, frown for a moment as he oriented himself, and then continue speaking.

When Roll wasn't tending to him, she was ensuring that X's test capsule was constructed, and surveying sites to hide it. But as Dr. Light progressed further and further towards death, she stayed with him more and more.

"And to think you wanted to leave me shut down for this part!" she chided him. "What was your plan, to live on air alone?"

Dr. Light murmured something about boot sequences.

A particularly vicious coughing spasm had Roll half-convinced that Dr. Light had ruptured a lung. On another occasion he fell asleep with his eyes open. When he hit REM sleep, the sight of the haggard shape's darting eyes—despite being completely unconscious—made Roll so uncomfortable she had to walk into the woods to calm herself. Dr. Light lost control of his bladder first, then his bowels shortly thereafter, though with his meager diet there wasn't as much mess as might be expected.

Through it all he remained lucid. He was painfully aware of all that was happening to him. That had to be the worst part, Roll decided—to have your body falling apart, knowing you can't stop it, knowing tomorrow will be worse. People with other diseases didn't have that problem. Heart disease was a ticking bomb; the anticipation was terrible, but if you could deal with that, you'd be fine right up until you really, really weren't. Some diseases induced feverish hallucinations, others warped perception. Many terminal illnesses were so painful that mind-altering drugs were the only way to take the edge off. Diseases like this one—debilitating, but slowly, without too much pain and without touching the mind—made the sufferer completely aware of his mortality and state of decay.

Roll decided she didn't understand humans. If it was her, she was sure she'd be feeling a lot more despair than Dr. Light evinced. Then again, part of it might have been how close they were coming to done…

Testing took up more and more of their time. If Dr. Light hadn't already been dying, Roll was sure it would have started the process.

They spent endless hours tracing problems through the labyrinthine corridors of X's core. They debugged unceasingly, for no amount of genius could keep errors from creeping in. Syntax errors, logic errors, function call errors, transcription errors—and those were merely the sorts of errors that kept the programs from executing. Having those programs execute and produce the right outputs was an order of magnitude more difficult.

Still they pressed on. The combat-oriented subroutines didn't require much tweaking, as Dr. Light had optimized those early on. They labored particularly over X's conscience and self-correcting subroutines. "If X has a strong sense of self-awareness and his mind is strong, he'll be able to keep himself safe and fix the errors he finds along the way. It'll make up for a lot of the mistakes we're doubtlessly making in his programming."

"Mistakes? The last test run had no errors in any of the functions it examined."

"All that proves is that the program will run. It doesn't say anything about what sort of person he'll be."

"Which is why he needs so much time to test. You're hoping that his brain will debug itself."

"Well, that is a pleasant side-effect of doing it this way. Since the testing will exercise all parts of his brain, it should allow him to find most, if not all, problems."

"I don't understand. You're saying that X will be able to rewrite his own programming?"

"Sort of. More like any outputs will still be subject to the approval of his moral self."

And then, one day, Dr. Light merely nodded at the test results Roll brought him. "Good, good. Compile and install. Load the whole boot sequence and bring him to activation stage one. Oh, and add in this function."

She took the data padfrom him, looked at it. "What will that do?"

"It'll make sure he knows his name. He needs some sort of foundation, some starting point."

Roll didn't believe him. Roll was capable of understanding lies even if her programming prevented her from doing so herself. She didn't know why he would deceive her that way, but given their circumstances, she didn't press. "Is X finished, then?"

"You don't finish in this business. There's always more to do, more to optimize, more to troubleshoot, more to write. You never finish. You just stop."

"So we're stopping?"

Dr. Light coughed. His torso barely shifted, weak as his body was. Roll automatically wiped the blood from his face and mopped up some of his sweat in the bargain. "Do that and we'll see," he said.

Roll looked down at the data pad. For a moment, she contemplated reading the code herself—she'd become pretty decent at it over the past few months. She demurred. If he hadn't told her what it was, there was a reason, and she'd respect that.

"Alright," she said, and left him.

"Sometimes," Thomas said to the air, "we don't choose our stopping points."

* * *

Roll watched the progress of the program's compiling. She felt she ought to go back and tend to Dr. Light while she waited, but he'd given her specific instructions. She was aware of the human saying that 'a watched pot never boils', but, having boiled many a pot in her day, knew the statement to be false.

_The pain was lifting, like fog under a warm morning sun._

The computer informed her that the compilation was complete. Roll began loading the program into X's memory.

_Thomas tried to remember what the doctor's estimate of his lifespan had been. It seemed like so long ago that the encounter had taken place, and he'd left the written estimate in its still-sealed envelope. He decided it didn't matter. He wasn't going to take the doctor to task over it, and his opinion of the doctor mattered to no one._

The loading went quickly. Most pieces of it were already installed.

_Thomas tried to lift a hand to scratch his nose. He failed—his hand seemed so heavy. The itch seemed to go away on its own, though, so it was just as well._

Roll left the dataports in X's head attached to the lab's computer but retracted most of the other support systems. She would be able to monitor the process this way, while letting X do the work on his own, if he could.

_A drink of water would be nice. He felt so thirsty… all the time, these days, but particularly now. Where was it all going… oh. Roll would be upset, Thomas thought. She had *just* cleaned these sheets._

X's carapace was sealed now. Roll knew how Dr. Light had designed the activation sequence. The first step applied power, initialized X's body and basic functions, and awoke the lowest-level programs to govern fundamental functions. The second step would, after a proper and complicated boot sequence, bring X's consciousness to life.

She hesitated. This was momentous. This was what they had worked for! Shouldn't he be here? Shouldn't he be able to see the fruit of his labors?

But she knew it was impossible. Dr. Light was too old to leave the bed. X was too young to leave the lab. Contradiction.

She began activation stage one.

_Eyelids… what were they good for, anyway, Thomas wondered. Yes, yes, they kept the eyes clear of damage, and moistened them, so he supposed they were necessary. But what good was that if you could never keep them open when you wanted to? Even now they were closing and for the life of him (he decided he didn't understand or like that phrase) he couldn't force them open._

So far, so good. X's power distribution center filtered out minute amounts of electricity, slowly bringing him along. First came a modest shot to his brain to give him basic power control. Now able to think about the process, X's brain took control of his heart. Voltages and amperages ramped up.

_Did Roll know about how the capsule worked? Thomas was sure she did. He'd told her… more than once, now that he thought about it. Told her about how it would test X's mental abilities without bringing him fully to stage two activation. Told her about how if X were unstable or unsafe it would remain sealed, but permit unsealing if X had passed his tests and bring him to full wakefulness in the bargain. It wasn't a short spiel, in retrospect. She'd been awfully patient, listening to him repeat himself at length. He'd have to thank her for that._

Subsystems reported in, one after another. Names of components went from red to green. Thresholds were met, and exceeded. All as expected.

Roll's fists slowly unclenched. All the anxiety, hers and Dr. Light's alike, had been tied up in this process. It was one thing to test out bits and pieces and have them check out, but that was akin to an orchestra director only ever listening to the clarinets at one time, and the trombones at another, and the violins by part. At some point, you had to put it all together, and if that point was concert night, you really had to cross your fingers that things would work out.

That seemed to be the case. Dr. Light had done it after all.

_Really, thanking Roll was all Thomas had left to do. Everything else was in place. He'd done everything he could have been expected to do, and more. He'd kept his promise to Rock. X would have no strings attached. And he'd done right by X, too. He would have the power to do anything he wanted and the soul to do no more than was needed. He'd be able to love and hate and survive. If he could manage without knowing much of his father—and Thomas was sure he could—then there was no limit to what he'd be able to accomplish. And who knew? Maybe he would pave the way to new robots… better robots… robots with no strings, either._

STAGE ONE ACTIVATION COMPLETE appeared on the monitor. Roll nodded—well, she didn't, that would have been inefficient because no one was there to see it, but she would have nodded if people were around—and stood. Time to tell Dr. Light.

She didn't leave immediately, though. She looked down at X—X, who looked so much like her dear brother. Affection surged through her. She would protect him, as she couldn't protect Rock. She owed him that much.

_Yes, Thomas decided. He was satisfied. And that was enough._

The main computer blared a warning at Roll. She started. What was—stage two? Why?

X's eyes opened. "I love you, too," he said. His eyes closed again.

The alarms silenced. The message reporting stage one's completion reappeared.

X was alive, Roll realized. He was functional. There was still testing to undergo, but her confidence in his survival was absolute.

She knew just as assuredly that Dr. Light was dead.

One life.

* * *

Events moved quickly after that.

Roll placed X in the capsule, took it to a remote location, and buried it. Then she doubled back, retrieved Dr. Light's corpse from the freezer she'd placed it in, and brought it to the funeral home Dr. Light had prearranged.

People in nations around the world mourned. The news-feeds filled with editorials celebrating the man and his accomplishments. Important People said Important Things about an Important Man. And so on. Roll knew enough about grief by now to know what was genuine and what was obligatory.

The strangest tribute of all was, to her mind, the most sincere. A met walked to the front door of Light Labs and, without warning, self-destructed. Speculation about it ran rampant for days. Only Roll noticed that the debris from the explosion had landed in a 'W' pattern.

That, she decided, qualified as heartfelt.

Dr. Light's will was read shortly thereafter. She'd reviewed it, and knew what to expect. When Light Labs asked her how long she intended to remain functional, she instantly replied, "Thirty-one years." And heads nodded and affirmatives flowed and everything went along as planned.

In her mind, she already had the schedule laid out of how often she would visit the capsule, and when she would start looking for the right person to "discover" the capsule, and how she was going to introduce X to the world, and—most of all—what she was going to do and show X when he awoke.

She hadn't counted on Dr. Light's well-known deficiencies as a judge of character.

* * *

"Mort, how are you!"

"Mr. Kodos, what a surprise."

"How are things going today?"

"Good. The maintenance shop's humming along pretty well."

"Dr. Light left behind a good operation, did he?"

"He sure did."

"That's good. Not all of the finances of Light Labs are as… optimized. New construction keeps having cost overruns, R&D is a money pit. We're coming out ahead, the company's in no danger, but, well, we could really _do_ things if all our divisions had the same profit spreads as the repair division."

"I'll take your word for it, Mr. Kodos. I don't really know much about the rest of the company. I just focus on my shop."

"I know, I know. And it shows. You've managed to stay under budget on all the repair jobs the shop's been responsible for, earning Light Labs good money in the process. That means you're a clever operator."

"Well, thank you."

"I think a raise and a promotion might be in order if we can push revenues just a little bit higher."

"That sounds swell! Did you, er… have an idea how to do that?"

"One, I'll admit. I think we can cut overhead a little."

"How?"

"Well, there are certain types of jobs that you take on _pro bono_, aren't there?"

"I can't think of any, Mr. Kodos."

"Really? Surely there's at least one."

"…no, nothing's coming to mind."

"What about Roll?"

"Roll? Well, gosh. Yeah, I suppose I do that for… no, it doesn't really count. The expense for Roll's maintenance and repairs was built into the budget for the shop, in perpetuity. That line item's been there forever."

"So what you're saying is that keeping Roll operational is part of your operating expenses, not a job you just do for free."

"I suppose. They kinda sound the same when you put it that way."

"Hm. And that would mean that such a cost would become a credit to the company if no repairs or maintenance were needed, wouldn't it?"

"Yeaaah."

"It's a shame Roll needs maintenance so frequently. Without it dragging the shop down, I'm sure you'd have the best-operating division in Light Labs. That'd be worth a vice presidency, I'm sure."

"A vice…"

"If only Roll weren't around to sponge up that money. It's such a waste, don't you think? Is it really worth it to keep such an antiquated model around?"

"Mr. Kodos, she's…"

"Not she, Mort. It. No matter how female it looks, it is a robot—an asexual, inhuman automaton. Now, what were you saying?"

"It is one of Dr. Light's favorites. He built her—_it_ himself. Sh… IT was with him all through the Wily Wars. The guys in the shop love… it. Really easy to work on, too."

"Well, I guess there is something to be said for high morale. Not as much as there is to be said for a vice presidency. And making lots of money tends to raise morale, too. I suppose I'll leave that to you to decide. Who knows? Maybe you can find some other way to cut costs as much as this trivially easy thing would. It's a shame that mistakes are so easy to make, with unique models like Roll. If you don't get things exactly right, they just… stop working. Not that anyone would care. It's just a robot, after all. No family, no legal rights. A fancy doll, nothing more. Why Dr. Light obsessed over them so much is, well, a bit of a mystery, don't you think? And more than a little unseemly. Anyway, I'll be back after Roll's next maint… I mean, a month from now. We'll talk again."

"I… gotcha, Mr. Kodos."

"Splendid, Mort. Now I really must be going. Have a nice day."

* * *

Thirty years came and went.

X dreamed and dreamed.

He never fully reached stage two activation, but his mind was stimulated by the test capsule, so he wasn't truly asleep. He floated gently at the edge of consciousness for seventy years.

The capsule began its opening sequence. The first thing it did was initiate X's final activation procedure.

X's eyes opened.

_I am X,_ he thought. _I am loved._

He tried his hardest to remember who it was who loved him. He couldn't manage it. He'd been dreaming for seventy years; some things had been forgotten.

The lid of the capsule opened. A hand reached out to him. He accepted it and emerged into the world.

If he couldn't remember who loved him, he decided, he'd just have to love everyone.

* * *

_Fin_

* * *

_Thank you for reading._

_The story of Dr. Light's legacy continues with "Impertinence". There we meet Dr. Cain, a man who aspired to be Dr. Light's spiritual successor- and who suffered for his beliefs._

_Coming soon: "Awakening", wherein we meet a red robot who is every bit X's equal, but who is as different a being as the sun is different from the moon._


End file.
